The invention is generally related to the monitoring of television program viewing, and to the control of television program viewing responsive to electronic program information.
Given many people""s increasingly hectic lifestyles, it has become more and more difficult for television viewers to watch interesting television programs in their entirety. Demands placed on television viewers by their children, spouses, parents, etc. often make it difficult to view a television program without interruption. Television viewers may also be interrupted by telephone calls or unexpected visitors.
Due to the frequency of these distractions, therefore, it would be extremely desirable for many television viewers to be able to easily view missed portions of an interrupted television program.
One manner of viewing a missed portion of an interrupted program is to locate a rerun or repeat showing of the same program at a later time or date. Particularly given the increase in the number of available channels and television content providers, it is not uncommon for a given television program to be available at a later time or date. For example, some television programs are repeated a number of times during a week. In addition, some television content providers have east and west feeds that are time shifted relative to one another such that a program presented at one time on the east feed is available three hours later on the west feed. Some syndicated programs may also be available from multiple television content providers.
While the availability of repeat showings of television programs has increased, viewers often have significant difficulty in locating the repeat showings. A viewer is often required to manually search through printed program listings in magazines or newspapers, or manually search through online program listings supplied over the Internet. Some commercially-available consumer electronic devices also support electronic program guides, which display electronic program information received from a satellite feed, the Internet, or a direct-dial up connection. Manually searching through any of the aforementioned sources, however, can be time consuming and cumbersome.
Users may also attempt to avoid interruption of a television program by recording the remainder of a showing prior to dealing with the interrupting incident. However, recording a showing, e.g., with a video cassette recorder (VCR), is often not feasible due to time constraints, the difficulty in locating a blank tape, or due to the fact that the viewer""s VCR may already be occupied recording other material, among others. The difficulties associated with programming a VCR may also hinder some viewers from quickly starting recording of an interrupted program.
One attempt to address these concerns from a technological perspective has been implemented in personal video recorders, which essentially integrate a hard disk drive with a television encoding system to record received television content on a temporary basis for later playback by a viewer. One of the functions supported by such recorders is a xe2x80x9cpausexe2x80x9d function, whereby a viewer can quickly initiate recording of a television program being viewed from the point in which the pause operation was initiated. The viewer is then later able to return to the point of interruption and replay the same showing from that point. However, such recorders typically have a limited capacity that may not be sufficient to record sufficient information to accommodate a relatively long interruption. Moreover, a viewer may not have time to view a paused recording after an interruption has been addressed, particularly if the viewer was intending to watch a program prior to performing another activity at a specific time.
In addition, another limitation of both personal video recorders and VCR""s is that the recording typically begins at the point of interruption, or later. However, after an interruption, a user may wish to view the entire television program, or at least a portion of the television program immediately prior to the interruption, should the user forget what happened in the television program prior to the interruption. Conventional technologies such as personal video recorders and VCR""s therefore typically limit the ability of users to obtain useful frames of reference when attempting to resume interrupted television programs.
Therefore, a significant need continues to exist in the art for a manner of facilitating the resumption of viewing of interrupted television programs.
The invention addresses these and other problems associated with the prior art by providing an apparatus, program product and method in which electronic program information is accessed in response to a determination that a showing of a television program has been interrupted to locate one or more repeat showings of the interrupted television program. Then, if a repeat showing is located for an interrupted television program, a number of different activities may be performed, including but not limited to notifying the user of the repeat showing (either immediately or at a later time), setting a timer to remind the user of the repeat showing, automatically displaying the repeat showing, automatically recording the repeat showing, etc.
The determination that a showing of a television program has been interrupted may be responsive to manual input by a user (e.g., depression of a button on a remote control), or may be automated to be responsive to tracking what programs are being viewed in a television system (e.g., by tracking viewing times for one or more television programs). Moreover, for automated determinations of television program interruptions, such determinations may be performed at different times, e.g., after a channel change that occurs while a user is watching a television program, or during power on after a power off occurs while a viewer is watching a television program. Other alternatives will be apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the instant disclosure.